Our nation's roads and highways represent the life blood of our transportation system and impact on our daily lives in significant and myriad ways. Commercial enterprises such as commerce, industry, trucking and livery and public-funded entities such as police, firefighters, emergency response units, and countless other organizations and individuals in both the private and public sectors rely on local, state, and federal transportation departments to provide and maintain a sound infrastructure of roads and highways.
However, in order to support such an infrastructure, road construction and maintenance represents an ongoing and essential activity. While most travelers view road construction and road crews merely as an annoyance or impediment to timely arrival at their intended destination, clearly such a view is misplaced. Rather those who work to build and maintain the roadways facilitate, in the long run, quick easy and efficient access to location that would otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to reach. In addition, road crew personnel assume a substantial risk of bodily injury from both unwary or inattentive drivers, as well as from other road construction equipment. For example, in the course of placing road markers such as cones, barriers, or signs, used to notify and alert drivers, road crew personnel have often been injured and even killed.
A number of solutions have been developed in the past to prevent such injuries to road crew personnel and to provide a safer and more secure work environment to those individuals in the act of placing or retrieving markers from the road surface. For example, an impact attenuation device placed on the back of a truck or other vehicle provides some measure of security to such road crew personnel. However, it is typical that in the course of placing or retrieving markers, such persons performing the task walk alongside the maintenance vehicle, and are thus left unprotected and susceptible to injuries from other drivers or by the vehicle itself. Accordingly, it is highly desirable to obtain a more secure apparatus and method for retrieving and placing markers onto a road surface.